Did cell phones ruin the internet? What was internet like without popular social media, Jow Forums?

the internet was better before it fit into your pocket.

this

the internet was like the wild west back in the day and everything was fresh and new and only the smart people found these types of groups and were full of creative and interesting nerds. Now its just every fucking normie ever comes here evern if they are some stupid fucking retard that has no idea whats going on and has never lurked before. The internet is now over saturated and over controlled. NO FUN ALLOWED

Damn this hit me like a truck

Im bumping

Unironically women ruined the internet. They entered the internet and suddenly everything is empty posing and normiehood is mandatory.

Normalfaggots and hoes ruined the fucking internet.
They also ruined pretty much everything else.

Eternal September

all these apps and shit are leeches and parasites feeding off the host, which is the internet.

I agree. The only good thing tho is porn, other stuff like twitter, facecuck and normie sites are thw worst

2011 and the proliferation of the smart phone is what ruined the internet and culture as a whole.

If we dont regulate smart devices like weed or cocaine we are headed into a whole new era of degeneracy like the 60s and 70s

It always had something like it, forums, AIm chats, MSRC chats, peer to peer file sharing. Little faggy blog sites like Zanga and Friendster, and Livejournal.

You know what the fucking internet is like.

Animated Gif's were super cool at first, so everyone put them everywhere on their sites to make you see how good they were with computers, then we all realized that looked gay as hell so a slick minimalist design was better. Facebook was there at the right time to take the spotlight away from Myspace by being simple. No one had to fuck with banners and custom HTML.

Porn has also dominated the net and ads since the web could reliably display pictures. I must have been 14 the first time I saw a woman getting double penetrated. I bet that age is like 6 now. For me, it was almost as soon as I started using email. I guess 14 is kinda late to have an email these days.

I liked using MSRC clients to enter game chats and find everyone's private lobby. The client had way more controls and visibility than the in game chat menus so everyone would think you were a wizard hacker if you could appear in their private chat. I got many clans to destroy themselves fighting about who the traitor was that kept selling out their private room info to rival clans.

Ah, those were the days. Now cell phones make life into a nude trading card game for underage highschooler/middleschoolers. No wonder the FBI wants a back door to everyone's phones.

Sounds like you're the one echoing the no fun allowed opinion.

Before Torrents you had to download games on Warez sites in like 40 different 5mb pieces.

The internet was still the wild west in the 90's and early 2000s.

I remember in 1997 trading porn on AOL in chat rooms, i was 13, i thought i was getting pics from other 13 and 14 year olds...one night in college it hit me and i LOL'd so hard.

>What was internet like without popular social media, Jow Forums?
People spent less time memeing or socializing and more time playing games. There was a plethora of personal pages, each unique and different since there was no template and you had to make everything from scratch. You'd better not be epileptic because bright text was the norm, some websites were painful to read, but the novelty was impossible to resist to.
Most importantly : normies kept quiet and only used the Internet to check their E-mail, only Nerds partook in the WWW, meaning it was used as a refuge from reality (school, work, politics...) , whereas today you cannot escape hearing about those things even on the Internet.

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1,000x better. Oldfag here. I even remember when AOL opened up their servers to the internet. The decay in quality level was palpable. Social media was the opening of the gates to allow EVERONE who had previously refrained from experiencing life online. It was a way to get the stragglers involved, people who weren't interested in the internet despite the availability. Back in the early days it was mostly the truly inquisitive and intelligent demographic using the internet. When you interacted with people you knew you were dealing with the high IQ/EQ, more advanced humans. Even if you didn't necessarily agree with their politics or stance on particular issues, you could at least get a good debate or argument routinely. Social media did to the internet what slums have done to once-great cities.

I think it's got more to do with social media than phones.
But then again phones popularized social media.

>What was internet like without popular social media, Jow Forums?

It was pretty good. There wasn't really any centralised social places so people tended to find their cosy niche places to hang out. Like around forums or IRC channels for a certain video game or music type.

It was more fun in terms of content because of the variety of websites. Everything these days revolves around YouTube, Facebook, Instagram etc., whereas before every subgenre of whatever had their own sites or group of sites.

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It was a twisted place to go as a kid. Guaranteed to get someone trying to see to describe what your butthole felt like in chat, even though you were in disney chatroom. 56k modems sucked even when you didn't know there could be something better.

Gif related was the first meme I remember seeing.

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AOL ruined the internet.
Iphones ruined the internet for the post AOL people.

Early internet had an intelligence barrier to entry

Total shit and slow. You were fixed to a spot and time because dialup only was cheap during the day. Disconnected randomly.
No apps to centralize stuff. Emails undelivered regularly. Windows 98 crashing, XP even more.
Online dating was the same too, fat crazy bitches looking for Chad, guys larping as girls for lulz, 1 random normie girl by 100 false flags looking for a 30 minute flirt and never meeting up with you.
It's by far better now and people didn't change much. There's only a handful of attention whore thots trigering virgins. Even girls gotta work and keep their contacts tight online like well under 500 people.

>dialup only was cheap during the day
meant
*dialup only was cheap during at a time of the day

Anyone else use a ghost mouse program running at night + AllAdvantage to get free money? I was so proud when I got my first $20 check from them.

It makes sense now as to why cultures in Europe didn't even allow women to read and write, even that little power is too much for them.

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I'm 32 and had internet pretty early, before anyone else I knew (in UK). It was absolutely fucking amazing back then, everything was better. Normies came and it has never been the same since, it gets worse day by day.

you know.
good argument. the sidekick ruined myspace for sure.

This and you had Kazaa.

>there are people ITT who will never know what it was like trying to play multiplayer by having to get your modem to phone the modem of the other player

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I started using the internet for multiple hours a day in like 2002 when I was 5 years old. It was definitely more magical, mysterious, open to exploration and adventure etc. Especially for online video games. Video game wikis didn't exist yet so everyone still had to figure shit out for themselves which led to much more organic social interactions and genuine adventures. And that was kinda true for the whole internet, it felt more like a frontier that everyone was still navigating.

But it was also SLOW as fuck, I do not miss that at all. And it was more dangerous too because viruses were more malicious, there wasn't as much security, and people were generally naive. With nostalgia goggles it seems great but honestly I think I would rather have the modern internet than the 2002 internet, normal fags and social media included.

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> play multiplayer
I play video games because fuck other people, user

god i miss those days !

I remember when multiplayer on seperate machines was a huge thing. Player Doom coop for the first time over a LAN and being like "woah this is like virtual reality!" was an amazing feeling.

Almost anything you could think of that you wanted to learn about had a Geocities page. Which has now I guess been replaced by Wikipedia.

I used to pirate more films and music than I could ever hope to watch/listen to. I don’t even watch films anymore and I just stream music off of YouTube.

I remember that.

t. nostalgia goggles. internet was infuriatingly slow in those days

And it was better for it.

You could find exactly what you were looking for quickly. lots of info, books, manuals

It was much more useful for information.

Another thing, almost all of the the porn sites all had military (.mil) domain addresses. No shit

Rose colored lenses. We didn't stray outside of the few sites we knew. The computer was in the living room, so you couldn't jack off, even if you managed to download 1 or 2 tiddy pics.

Later there was Napster, kazza, and limewire. By that time most people had a dedicated cable hookup, so you could download a few vids of Heather Brooke (is it cool to post blowjob chick? You know the chick if you remember early p2p sharing)

That's where the Trojan horse epidemic hit, and parents would beat their children because the little fuckers destroyed an operating system downloading extra shit along with the latest korn album.

The best.

The internet is still slow today. Video still buffers no matter how fast your connection. The speeds back in the day were fine because websites were basic and not filled with distractions like so many are now.

My dad was really interested in computers so would get new one every year or so, so I had my own hand-me-down since very young. So I got to stay in my room playing dos games and shit. You can say it was rose tinted but I truly believe it was more fun, for me at least. It was totally different to the real world, you could do/say/be whatever but now the real world and the internet are one and the same, they are intertwined so you cannot escape to that wondrous world no longer.

Internet forums used to be fucking awesome. They where populated with lots of people and had quality content.

After facebook, twitter and social media they died out

Used to see a lot of fucked up shit running credit based mirc bots. man… the shit people used to upload for credits...

racist

It wasnt slow if you used it right.

youre on one right now retard

and no the standard forum formatsucked ass, constant asslicking and the most pretentious arrogant retards everywhere

Wifey…

It was like Jow Forums more or less.

2007 had shit data plans and bad phones, people weren't plastered to their phones 24/7 till unlimited plans became more affordable.
I'd probably stick it at 2010-2012 for when it went from bad to complete and utter ass.
2016 forward is just a fucking landfill on fire of total idiot bitch retardation.

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Some where great. I made several good real life friends from online forums.

No niggers. It was glorious and I had hope for humanity then.

Better. Like everything before women fucking invade and ruin it for everyone involved.

we were more secluded into our niche pockets, but that meant that everyone's voice was a little bit louder

When I was a lad, the very thought of streaming 4K video in realtime was a madmans dream, and making a living doing so playing video games was beyond absurd.
But is the world now. A retard-accessible veneer to give every smug tween the globe as a platform. And jesus christ did it fuck with their egos. Or maybe just uncovered it.

I was thinking about this. The good internet is more than likely still out there. But we just gravitate towards the easy to use centralised sites. If you treat the internet like you did back in 1999 then it's probably roughly the same.

Or use Tor.

To be fair, it's an accurate representation of the old internet

You must 18 or older to post here, now fuck off Jayden.

>When I was a lad, the very thought of streaming 4K video in realtime was a madmans dream

Or copying a game in minutes rather than hours via 43 floppy discs.

Shit man I remember that blonde. I used to download Silvia Saint videos too. I think that is where I got a thing for blondes with braids.

I used to jerk off to mememolly's vids

youtube.com/watch?v=JPnInoPZnP4

It was a lot easier meeting new people and making new friends from across the globe. Maybe because the few people that used it had a sense of novelty and awe from being able to speak to people so far away for free which was really something unthinkable a few years back (telephone bills too expensive), maybe because most normies for some reason though the internet and computers were too hard and you had to be a nerd genius to be able to use one.

There were no women on the internet, or so we thought, and if people knew that you used computers on a daily basis, they would just know for a fact that you were a hacker for sure and could hack anyone you wanted.

Those ICQ days were good times, you could just add a bunch of random people on your friend list and they would be more then happy to talk to you and learn about different people from different places. Funny that now with social media that couldn't be anymore different, people will only add you somewhere if the know you from real life, and even then they will just flat out ignore you unless you bonded before somehow. Made lot of good friends from back then that I still have to this day.

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>wearing socks in selfies

The girls wearing socks trend needs to end now

Girls are meant to be barefoot and show off their qt little fem feet.

I demand qt feet in my mouth right now.

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people who talk about the internet getting ruined by social media and smartphones are ignoring the fact that much of the third world got major internet access around the same time

it used to be if you played with a random person in an MMO (that wasnt tibia online) you were likely meeting an introverted westerner like yourself. but nows its just third worlders everywhere in online games.

>Those ICQ days were good times, you could just add a bunch of random people on your friend list and they would be more then happy to talk to you and learn about different people from different places

Holy shit that takes me back.

For a bit of fun I got my 17yo brother to try to get flashback to boot on my old win95 laptop (WITH the instruction manual)
he got to the setup menu and gave up

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"rose colored lenses" is literally an attempt at gaslighting

"B-BUT user THOSE FOND MEMORIES YOU HAVE ARE JUST... UHM... THEY'RE WRONG!!! YOU'RE DELUSIONAL!!! EVERYTHING HAS ALWAYS BEEN AS SHITTY AS IT IS NOW!!! I SAID STOP FONDLY REMEMBERING THE PAST!!! NOO!!! STOP IT!!! REEEEEEEE!!!"

basically chat rooms with dudes posting as "young lesbians" for cyber sex and archaic sites with gore pics

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>5 in 2002

Jesus I feel old. I started my internet misadventures in 1994 at like 8. And yeah while the whole thing was slow and frustrating you just did what you did and dealt with it.

Ahh. Yeah, you were atypical for kids with internet. I used to fuck around on Yahoo chat and msn, played a bunch of java games. I remember the l's and uppercase I's were the same on Yahoo, so you could go onto a Christian chat room and steal someone's handle to pray to Satan. Fun times.

Setting up those fucking DOS games with the right sound and joystick options, man... I'm glad I have D-Fend, now !

ICQ, IRC, Yahoo chat, MSN... So much pussy if you were in the right circles. Women were rare back then but if you wanted to find a horde of them you just go to some self harm forum and it is like shooting fish in a barrel.

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The internet used to be an escape from reality.
Now the internet IS reality.

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You should talking to your lawyer Dan, not us.

desktop PLUS mobile. It's not clear what percentage of mobiles there is.

That's not how it works. It's desktop + mobile because the mobile sessions are shown on top of the desktop sessions. Otherwise the lines would be harder to distinguish.

The light blue area is 100% phoneposters.

>internet full of third worlders

yeah basically lel

It's because so many young people today don't know what it was like to life in a happy and fun world. Unironically very sad.

Minus the kike propaganda

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How old are you OP?

Newgrounds, eBaumsworld, Albino Blacksheep...

It was novel. It wasn't the greatest thing in the world.

Tfw my children will never know mininova or what.cd.

They only know vpn and Popcorn time.

I weep

it was better than what we have now

more doesnt always equal better

Ideepthroat.com

20

what happened to what.cd? i remember doing an interview over IRC with them lel

4u
I lived in rural TN in 2001 and had ~30mbps cable internet from Charter.

This. It just was better. Not nostalgia. It really was better. Especially the early mid 2000 internet era

Nah the internet is still cool, nobody said you had to use social media. I feel like cell phones ruined people.

>Tfw my children will never know...what.cd.
Redacted is a fine replacement

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